Aberlour charity turns to Pulsant for data hosting

Aberlour Child Care Trust is a Stirling-based charity that focuses on supporting children, young people and families across the country, transforming their lives and helping them overcome challenges.

Pulsant's cloud offering is based at its South Gyle data centre in Edinburgh. Picture: Contributed

As an organisation that delivers such critical services and support, having access to data and core systems at all times is a vital requirement.

When Aberlour began looking at the best way to update the legacy infrastructure at head office, it became clear that replacing existing hardware with new hardware wasn’t going to meet the organisation’s needs.

Instead, to reduce costs and increase efficiency, the charity wanted to move to an operating expenditure model, which led to selecting a hosting partner. In addition, Aberlour wanted to bolster its back up capabilities and reduce the complexity of its existing back-up solution.

Pulsant, already a connectivity supplier to the charity, was selected to provide the platform based on its cost competitiveness, customer service and technology offering. The company provided its enterprise cloud solution, a platform that uses the latest HP servers, Cisco networking and VMware virtualisation technology that is deployed on top of the company’s 10Gb network. The cloud is hosted in Pulsant’s South Gyle tier 3 data centre that is also ISO 27001 accredited.

When it came to Aberlour’s back-up requirements, the charity wanted a solution that provided quick and easy access to data that was reliable in terms of retrieving the data and setting up a new environment if needed. To address these requirements, Pulsant supplied cloud back-up, powered by Asigra.

The Asigra solution ensures that all compression, de-duplication and encryption is performed locally before sending data off site to a storage platform in a secondary Pulsant data centre in Milton Keynes. The service is accessible by authorised Aberlour IT staff via a fully functional portal and user-friendly interface that facilitates the quick retrieval of data down to the individual file level.

Throughout the project Pulsant worked closely with Aberlour’s IT team to ensure the success of the project, migrating Aberlour’s key systems to the Pulsant Enterprise Cloud platform, proving colocation services, and deploying cloud-based back-up.

• Chris Shields is regional sales director at Pulsant